Gone to the Forest

1

Tom hears the noise from across the hall. A quick stream of native patois. At first he thinks it is the servants talking. But then he hears the crackle of static. The high cadence of a bugle. The voice picks up again and is louder. Agitated and declaiming.

It is the radio — somebody has left the radio on. Tom gets to his feet. The old man is not in his study, he is out by the river. But the noise is not coming from the old man’s study. Tom follows the sound down the corridor. He goes to the kitchen, thinking perhaps Celeste has been listening to the afternoon drama—

The kitchen is empty. The dishes sit washed and gleaming on the shelves. A drip of water from the tap. Perplexed, Tom turns around. The voice continues to speak from somewhere behind him. He follows the sound to the veranda. There, a radio sits on the edge of the table, the volume turned high.

Brothers, our time has come. We are tired of being ground under the boot of the white oppressor. We are tired of being suffocated by these parasites. For so many years we have not even been aware of their tyranny. We have been sleeping!

A chair has been pulled up to the table. As if someone has been sitting and listening intently. Tom does not immediately recognize the radio — he thinks it has been taken from the library, he cannot be sure. On the farm, they do not often listen to the wireless. Impossible to understand why it is here on the veranda.

Now it is time for us to awaken from our slumber. Rouse up, brothers! We will achieve our liberation and we will free this land! There will be a price. The parasites will not give up this country so easily. But we are brave, we are righteous men—

Tom frowns and switches the radio off. It is unusual to hear a native voice on the radio. The patois is thick and filled with anger. He can barely understand the words, it is a guttural nonsense to his ears. He still cannot imagine who could have moved the radio to the veranda. No servant would have dared do such a thing.

He looks at the chair. He thinks he can see an indentation in the seat. Like a ghost has broken into the farm, and in broad daylight, too. It is a good thing he was the one to discover it. Tom looks both ways before adjusting the chair and picking up the radio. Holding the machine, he looks out onto the land. It is quiet and he retreats inside.

THE HOUSE SITS by the edge of the river. It is big — a house with multiple wings and rooms and a veranda running along three sides. Outside this giant house there is a double row of trees, planted by the old man’s natives. Tom sits in the dirt beneath one of these trees, where there is shade from the blistering sun.

Tom’s father was among the first of the white settlers. Forty years ago, the old man arrived in the country and claimed his piece of land. One hundred thousand acres down a ten-mile spine running through the valley. The land belonged to no one and then it belonged to him. A stake driven into the soil. The old man swallowed up the land and filled it with native hands. The money and good fortune came shortly after.

The farm sits adjacent to the border and from its perimeter the neighboring country is visible. The parcel is big and the soil arable and there is also the river, which is wide and fast, clouded with sediment and Sargasso weed. The old man picked the land for the river. It runs straight out to the sea. The carnivorous dorado swim through in herds and purple hyacinth sprout on the surface.

For many years, the old man used the land as a cattle farm. The vast acreage turned to pasture, the herd growing by the year. A small crop also harvested. Today, he runs the farm as a fishing resort, for tourists who come from all parts of the world. The old man is imperious with the guests in the same way he is imperious with his servants. They do not seem to mind. They stay in the guest wing of the house and pay good money for the privilege.

Tom manages the farm. He oversees the daily operation of the cattle pasture, the fields, the river and the house. It is a great deal for one man to handle but Tom is good at his job. He is good with the fluctuations of the land, which he is able to read correctly. Also the domestic affairs of the house and kitchen. Tom is diligent and has an eye for detail, in which he often takes comfort.

Tom is the old man’s first and only son. This means that one day he will inherit the farm. He will run the fishing resort and that will be the whole of his life. Tom can see no other kind of future. It is the only horizon before him, but he has no sense of its constriction. Tom has a passion for the land. It is the one thing he knows intimately. He burrows into it, head down in the dirt, and cannot imagine a life beyond it.

Therefore, Tom sits beneath his tree. He presses his limbs into the soil, as if they would grow roots. It is the last week of the season but it is still hot. Normally, the tourists would have stayed. For the sun and the fishing, and with winter so slow to come. They would have sat on the veranda in friendly clusters, ideal for souvenir photographs. The women in tea dresses and the men in linen suits. Drinks served on the veranda after a hot day on the river.

Instead, the veranda is empty and silent. The radio having been returned to the library and the chair righted. Tom looks up when the door opens. The old man steps out onto the veranda. He is still in his work clothes, having spent the afternoon shooting old livestock. It is a task he always does himself. There are traces of gunpowder on his boots, the smell of fresh blood. The old man stands on the veranda, six feet tall in his riding boots, and does nothing to acknowledge his son.

After a long silence, he calls to him.

“Thomas.”

He is called Tom by everyone except his father, who calls him Thomas. It causes a split inside Tom/Thomas. He thinks of himself as Tom but only recognizes himself as Thomas. He does not know his own name. He realizes, has been aware for some time, that this is no way for a man to be. It is not something he can discuss with his father. He rises to his feet and goes to the old man.

“Yes, Father.”

His father watches him and is silent. He looks at Tom like he has never seen him before in his life. Possibly he wishes it were so. All this land and they cannot get away from each other, though that is not the way Tom sees it. The sun glows orange in the sky. For a long time his father is silent. Then he speaks.

“The Wallaces dine with us tonight.”

“Yes.”

“Have you spoken to Celeste?”

“Yes.”

“Fine.”

The old man nods. On the farm they squander money on food. The youngest animals are slaughtered for the table. Pods stripped from the stalk. Roots upended from the soil. And then there are the tins of foie gras and caviar, the cases of wine that are flown in from abroad. Everything for the kitchen. Anything that could be needed.

Tom turns to go. He is not more than five paces away when something makes him stop. He is already turning when his father calls him again. Tom waits, some distance from his father.

“What is Celeste serving?”

“Tonight?”

His father ignores the question. Tom is immediately uneasy. It is not a normal query. The old man treats Tom like his chief of staff. He manages for the old man, sometimes he allows himself to imagine he is indispensable to him. But he is never able to get used to the idea. There is never the opportunity. The old man does not allow for it.

For example, now. His father is a man of appetite. He trusts Celeste with his stomach and that makes Celeste the most trusted member of the household. But now his father is asking what the menu will be and this is not normal. Fortunately, Tom has discussed the meal with Celeste. He clears his throat — a habit the old man hates — and begins.

“Oysters. Gnocchi. Lamb. Salad. Then cheese and ice cream.”

His father nods.

“The oysters?”

“They were brought in this morning.”

His father nods again.

“No fish?”

“No.”

“Why no fish?”

“I will ask Celeste.”

“Tell her to put out the last of the caviar. I have no need of it. And tell Celeste to set the table for five.”

Mr. and Mrs. Wallace are occasional friends. They are marginal people of no interest to his father. The old man has made that abundantly clear. He does not say who the fifth guest is. Tom waits. The old man looks up.

“Do you have something else to tell me?”

He thinks of the radio on the veranda. Who left it there? Tom shakes his head. No. Nothing. His father nods and Tom goes. He walks to the kitchen to look for Celeste. This time she is there, stuffing pastry for the farmhands. She palms the meat into the pastry and slaps the food down on the tray. He stares at the meat. It is pink and red and white. Raw and unformed. Celeste looks up.

“He wants to know if there is fish for tonight.”

She shakes her head.

“Ah no.”

“He would like fish.”

She sighs and wipes her hands on a tea towel.

“Why?”

He ignores the question.

“Also he says to serve caviar to start, and to set the table for five.”

She shakes her head. Tcha tcha tcha, her tongue in her mouth. She throws down the tea towel. Neither Tom nor Celeste wants to serve fish at supper. But both know there will now be fish alongside the lamb, an additional course in an already long meal. Celeste will dress the fish in saffron and butter. Jose will pass around the table with the platter resting on his arm, lifting slabs of fish to the plates. He will use the silver serving spoon to pool sauce on top. Tom clears his throat.

“Did you take the radio out to the veranda?”

She stares at him blankly.

“What do you mean?”

Tom nods, then leaves the kitchen and walks outside. The air is still. He stands outside the house.

Something is wrong. The tourist season has been a failure. It was supposed to refill the coffers. It was meant to provide security. But the season brought them nothing and now the money is running out. Everybody knows the money is running out. It is no longer secret, it can be seen everywhere on the farm.

But there will be caviar, and guests! He does not understand his father. He goes up the steps and into the house. He walks along the veranda, along the perimeter of the house. Everything is as it should be. He enters the dining room. The table has not been set. Five, the old man said to lay the table for five. Tom stands for a long moment. He looks at the heavy oak table and the chairs. He stares at the marble topped credenza.

TOM RETURNS TO the row of trees. He sits in idleness. It is the tempo of this place. It overtakes him, he has no resistance to it. It is true Tom is a good manager, but that is almost despite himself, fundamentally he is lazy. His father is different. His mother was different. His mother was like his father, she was not from this place. She was nervous, set to a tempo that was out of pace with the draw of the land.

It could not be changed. His mother came ten years after his father and left ten years ago, dead from exhaustion. They shipped her body back across the sea in a bare pine box at the request of her family. The life had been too much for her. His father said that the moment she set foot on the land. Nobody was surprised when she died. It took her twenty years to do it and they were surprised it took her so long. She had been dying the whole time. She was half dead when she gave birth to him and after that died by increments.

Tom remembered her sometimes. Early on she had been diagnosed consumptive. That was a disease from long ago, an illness that no longer existed, but it still managed to kill her. She ate up her body. In the last years of her life she burned through her organs and limbs, she combusted inside her skin. Like she was in a hurry and couldn’t wait any more. Sometimes he could smell the scent of her decay, lifting high off her body.

That was his mother. She gave birth to him and he slithered from between her legs and out into the land and dust. From the start he was of this place. He was country born and at home with the bramble. For the first year Celeste nursed him at her tit. She held him while he scratched and suckled. Celeste had a son exactly Tom’s age, Jose. She raised the two boys together. Jose’s father being nowhere in sight. However, the two boys did not grow up like brothers.

Jose was healthy, indefatigable, stubborn even as an infant. Tom, on the other hand, was not a strong child. He had a skin condition that weakened his body and stunted his growth. Dry scales grew at his elbows and knees. Left alone, Tom would peel long strips of skin from his body. When Celeste discovered the raw lengths she would take him to the river and press handfuls of mud against his wounds. Covered in river sludge, he was left out in the sun to heal.

Between themselves, the natives called him Lizard Boy. His father blamed his mother for the boy’s condition but Tom always believed the weakness to be his own. In the same way the land was seated deep inside him: it was a congenital disorder of sorts. He also knew the weakness meant that he would not die like his mother. It was self-preserving. He retreated into his weakness and lay down inside it. It was a thing of comfort in a life that was not, on the whole, filled with comfort.

As a child he sought solace in lies, and has been a liar ever since. He is not a good liar but he is a persistent one. The first time he lied over a plate. Tom had been sent to the neighboring farm for the afternoon. The farmer’s son had a set of plastic dishes. The colors were cheap and bright and when Tom pressed his thumbnail into the plastic it left a crescent-shaped mark. Tom wanted one of the plates. He slipped it into his pocket. Then he got up quickly and left without saying goodbye.

His father was waiting for him at the steps of the house, like he had seen his guilt from a distance. He stopped Tom and lifted him from the ground, his fingers digging into Tom’s armpits in a way that was not friendly. Tom kicked to be lowered and the plate fell to the floor. The plastic sounded ugly and hollow against the tile. Stupidly, he tried to conceal the plate with the sole of his boot.

His father did not look surprised.

“Where is that from?”

“The boy gave it to me.”

“He gave it to you?”

“A gift.”

“The boy gave you a gift.”

“Yes.”

“You are lying.”

He was whipped by a servant. His father did not bother to listen. To the whizz of the cane, to his miserable shrieks and howls. Nonetheless, Tom continued to lie. His father asked him who broke the vase in the hall. Who left the gate open and set loose the cattle. It was like the sight of his father’s face made the lie that followed inevitable.

Even then, all Tom wanted was the old man’s approval. Unfortunately, he was never able to act in a manner to win it. Tom knew he would not be punished for the act itself, only for the lie. What his father did not understand was the lying. He needed, on the whole, to dominate what he did not understand. Tom told one lie and then another. He was whipped by the servants again.

TOM WAS NOT a good liar, but Tom’s mother had been good enough to make a career of it. She lied to her husband for the full course of her affair with a neighboring farmer. She used Tom as an excuse. She said he was uncomfortable with himself and other children. He needed to be socialized — that was the fashionable term she applied to her son’s unfashionable condition. Every other day she walked him three miles to the neighboring estate. She left him in the yard with the other children and disappeared inside.

The children played in the dirt and listened to the shrieks that rang out across the farmstead. Which sometimes sounded like an animal dying, painfully. She came out of the farmhouse with her skin a hectic red and one hand pressed against her head. Tom watched as she smoothed her hair into place. Calmed the surface of her dress. Then they walked the three miles home, his hand sticky in hers. He knew but did not mind the fact that she was lying. He thought the secret would bring them closer.

There were other flaws in his character, beyond dishonesty and misapprehension, which together conspired to make the son incomprehensible to the father. For example, Tom was a coward. He was easily frightened and physically uncertain. He was not very old when the physical fear became a moral one. It was therefore natural that his father held him in contempt: the old man does not recognize fear as a valid emotion.

It did not help that Tom was especially afraid of the dorado. To him they were a terrifying fish. The dorado grew four feet long in the river, larger than a child and much larger than the child Tom had been. The male fish bore square blocked foreheads and male and female alike their bodies turned gray as they died out of water. But while alive the fish were fearless and had tremendous appetite.

Tom’s father loved the dorado. He is this fish: his father is the dorado. Once, when Tom was a boy, he took him out on the river. He might have been experimenting with the idea of being a father because he was unusually patient. He taught Tom to cast out to the water. He showed him how to reel in. He said very little but he told him that the dorado were a vicious fish that ate into a man’s strength.

Tom remembered how his father caught the dorado on the line. How he began to reel it in. The fish rose out of the water and dropped back in. It appeared to Tom as large as a grown man, as large as his father. It jerked through the water, under the boat, into the air, back into the water. The rod almost bending in two. Tom was not certain that his father would bring it in. He thought surely the rod would snap.

But his father brought the fish in. It was a giant. Male, with the alien crested forehead, the yellow body thrashing against the line. His father lifted it high in the air. He admired the heft and weight, the golden turn of the scales, the tremendous girth of the fish. Then he placed it in Tom’s arms. Tom almost fell with the weight of the dorado, the coldness of the scales, the inner muscle of the animal shuddering hard against its death.

When he came to, his father was standing above him, holding the fish by its tail. Tom watched as he seized a knife and dug into the belly of the fish. He drew a long vertical slit and the crimson guts of the animal tumbled out onto the deck. He ignored his son as he scooped the intestines into one hand and threw them back into the river. The dorado swarmed the boat, jaws snapping.

The fish became their livelihood. Running a farm was an expensive business. The river supported the farm and allowed them to maintain the large holding of land. More and more tourists came to the province in search of the mighty dorado. His father took them out on the boats at dawn. He taught them to cast out and reel in. He brought in the fish and gutted them before their eyes, he treated them the same way he had treated Tom, years ago.

When his father arrived in the country he was a young man. Now he is old. Now he sits — he squats, he straddles — the land. But his presence has been heavy from the start. He picked out the land by riding in the night with a torch held high above his head. A native dug a trench in the soil behind him. The next day they went back with wood and wire and it was done. The old man makes his choice. He grips it out of the air with his hands. He is essentially a violent man.

Tom is different. He does not force himself upon the land. He does not force himself upon anything. There is very little that Tom can call his own. Tom is not like his father, Tom has chosen nothing. He did not choose the country or the piece of land. He did not choose the business of the farm. He did not choose the house, with its dark rooms and corridors. All this was chosen for him, and Tom barely aware of it. It is simply his world.

FOR SEVERAL YEARS the pool of guests has been dwindling. There have been empty rooms at high season and the river has remained full of fish, something impossible even a few years ago. Across the province there are fewer visitors. They are far from the cities to the north. The cost of travel is high. And there is unrest in the country, Tom has heard it said. It is growing and the news of it is spreading abroad — bad stories, violent stories that do not inspire confidence.

One by one the gentleman farmers are moving. The idea of living in open land surrounded by natives is no longer appealing. Those with houses in the cities are giving up the country life and moving north. They are closing their farms and estates, which are becoming too hard to protect, having always been vast and exposed. They leave them in the hands of the hardier settlers who remain in the province and are a restless and violent presence. They do not say when they might return.

The circle of refined company is shrinking day by day. Once there were dances and banyan parties — once there was a social calendar! Tom and his father remain. His father does not believe in the city. The other farmers tell him to move out of the country, that it is dying in front of them, that soon it will no longer be safe. His father chooses to stay on the side of the land. He cannot imagine being without the farm. In this, father and son are united.

It is now near evening. Tom stands in front of the mirror in his room. It is large and crowded with things. Furniture brought over from the old country by his mother or father. Objects shipped to them by strangers. He finds these histories oppressive but has essentially grown used to it. Tom does not expect privacy, even in his own room. Carefully, he adjusts the lapel on his jacket and smooths his hair back with grease. He checks the crease in his trousers and then leaves the room, closing the door behind him.

He walks the house in search of his father. He goes across the foyer, which is full of potted trees. Miniature orange trees. Plum trees. He passes the dining room and notes the good linen and silver and china. He sees that the table is now set for five. Five plates, five sets of glasses and cutlery. He pauses, and then walks out to the veranda, slowly.

He walks in the direction of the river and finds his father within minutes. The open land pulls to the river. Which has become the old man’s sole preoccupation as the province empties and the tourism dwindles. A year ago they installed the river farm. Now the pools float in the middle of the river like space age contraptions. The fish birthing and growing, inside the skin of the device. The river flushing in and out.

Tom frowns as he looks at the river. The old man has staked much on the river farm. The pools were installed at vast expense and they sucked the savings — the bounty of those years of lush tourism, now coming to an end — right into the water. At first it did not seem promising. The natives talked of evil and contamination. The eggs floated in the steel and mesh like a river disease.

But then the fish grew. They grew until the pools were full of fish flesh, pressed close together. Now it seems clear that the river farm is what will allow them to live. It will sustain the farm, through the rumors of unrest. It will pay for the imported caviar, the cashmere blankets, the fur coats, the coffee and tea. His father jokes that he is become a fishmonger but already there are plans for more pools, placed downstream, placed upstream. The province empties of landlords and tourists but there are always the fish and the natives.

Every week they drag the pools out of the water and the fish are culled. Then they are sold to buyers in the cities. They are packed into ice and flash frozen and shipped around the world. It is ridiculous, but they are earning themselves a reputation. His father talks about sustainable models of growth. He says there will be money soon, in the next year.

Tom does not like the river farm. When he looks into the water it is like the river is choking on the pools. The pools hovering like prey amidst the hyacinth. Being of the country, he cannot wish to dominate it in the same way as his father. Who in some ways is still a visitor here. But Tom knows his father is right. Soon the river farm will be established. The money will flow in like water. The money is floating in the river now, and it will save them.

Which is why his father stands and stares at the water — the way a man stares at a pile of gold. Tom watches his father looking at the pools. The pools can only be seen by the clear-sighted. They are nothing but the faintest trace in the water. The old man is dressed in dinner clothes. A rim of dust gathers around the toe of his shoe, is lifted on a slow gust of wind. The wind goes, and the dust is gone and the old man’s feet stand in the dirt.

The sound of a motor vaults across the silence. His father looks up. Tom sees the Wallaces’ Ford pulling across the land. A small cloud of dust follows as it kicks down the track. The dust pulls and tugs and puffs and grows behind the vehicle. The motor rumble comes closer. His father stands and watches as the car approaches. Tom has already turned and is walking back to the house. He turns his head once to look back. The car is inching closer across the horizon. Tom quickens his pace.

By the time the car has pulled through the gates of the house the servants are ready and the ice in the liquor trolley has been freshened. Tom stands in the shadow of the veranda and watches as the car pulls down the drive. His father stands at the foot of the steps, one hand slipped into his suit pocket. His face is expressionless. The driver pulls the door open. Mr. Wallace. Mrs. Wallace. A third figure steps out of the car. A young woman, in a brightly patterned dress, emerges from the interior.

2

The dorado is served in green sauce. It is served before the lamb and after the oysters and caviar. They sit around the table in silence as the wine is poured. The sun is setting and outside the sky continues to give off light. The dining room is open to the veranda but the room itself is half in darkness. Jose returns and lights the candles. His father nods to him and they listen to his footsteps as he goes. Then the room drops into silence again.

After a measurable pause — in which they sit and do not look at each other, and the candles waver and tremble in the silence — his father leans forward and picks up his wine glass. He takes a sip and examines the liquid hue. Mrs. Wallace looks at him. He almost looks benevolent, sitting in the candlelight with his wine glass in hand. Mrs. Wallace makes an attempt at conversation. (Mr. Wallace does not. Mr. Wallace knows better.)

“I have been saying to George, they must do something about this unrest amongst the natives. It is the Government’s responsibility to take some kind of action.”

The old man looks up from his glass of wine. He stares at Mrs. Wallace from across the table. Bravely, she continues.

“They should send in soldiers. They should teach them a lesson, before it gets out of hand. They are capable of anything, the natives. They are dangerous and cruel. It is impossible to reason with them. I wonder that they don’t see that.”

Mr. Wallace shakes his head.

“Enough, Martha.”

The old man ignores them both. He lowers his wine glass and looks across the table at the girl.

When the girl stepped out of the car she was a thin ankle followed by a ruffled tea dress. Her hair set in waves. Her mouth carefully rouged. She looked lost in the dress and in the car, a pantomime of vulnerability. Tom sits beside her at the dinner table. His father sits across. Tom watches the girl. He has no idea how old she is. She looks like a child but he already knows she is no child.

He learns the facts about the girl. She is Mrs. Wallace’s second cousin. She is twenty-nine and part French. She has won herself — through hard application, nothing coming easy in life — a questionable reputation. Although really there is no question about it at all, the meaning being clear to everyone. There was trouble at home and she was shipped to Mrs. Wallace, for a length of time unspecified. The meaning of that also being clear.

Mrs. Wallace does not know the girl but she is responsible for her. It is evident, they are in this together. She looks at the girl and her gaze is complicit. Tom thinks: being women the collusion comes to them naturally. He has heard it said before. Mrs. Wallace touches the girl on the wrist. She is careful but proprietary, proprietary but wary. She will be happy when the problem of the girl is solved and she will not miss her when she is gone.

For now she watches the girl. She measures up her assets and tests her strength in performance. Tom also watches the girl. She sits at the table. She speaks when she is spoken to. She is docile, she is polite. She is all this but there is nothing about her Tom trusts. He tells himself that she is not especially pretty. It is only her extreme pallor — she is so pale that when she blushes the color is hectic like a bruise — and her air of apparent youth that give the impression of attractiveness.

His father is a man of taste. The girl is nothing and yet — Tom watches his father watch the girl. The old man is still handsome. He is vain and vanity needs feeding. The women in the valley have been doing the feeding but the circle has been shrinking as one by one the farms close and the whites retreat to the city. Now there are not even the tourists to rely on.

This girl — sent out to Mrs. Wallace, small and pale and cunning — is perfectly shaped to capture the old man. She is nothing special but she is there and that is the difference. They are losing, have lost, the yardstick by which to measure the company of women. Not that Tom was ever a judge. He has not exactly been exposed to the female species.

Tom is filled with the urge to slap the girl across the face. His own vehemence taking him by surprise. Tom’s eyes stay on his father as he sips the wine and watches the girl.

“Carine.”

The girl looks up at him and then blinks. She waits for him to speak. Mr. Wallace and Mrs. Wallace look up from their plates. Tom does not look up. He stares down at his plate. He has not touched the food apart from the oysters. Topped with vinegar and white pepper. He slurped them down one after the other. Now his appetite is gone. He prods the food in front of him but does not eat.

“Do you like the fish?”

His father’s voice is slow and cajoling. The tone an offer, a proposition to the girl. Tom sees her find her terrain in the words. She and the old man look at each other. A transaction in their gazes and she opens herself up. Tom sees it happen: so the girl has aligned herself with the old man. Some intimacy has been established between them, in front of all of them, in that small and meaningless exchange.

The obscenity of it is not lost on anyone at the table. Mr. Wallace clears his throat and reaches for his wine glass. Mrs. Wallace looks down at her plate and pushes a chunk of fish with the tines of her fork. She toys with the fork and then sets it down without eating. Tom sees that they are ashamed. Of the trap that they have set, that is now in motion.

“Do you? Like the fish?”

Quickly, the girl reaches for her fork. She spears the flesh, breaking off a large piece and lifting it to her mouth. Her lips are pale and dry and cracked at the edges. It is the weather, Tom thinks. She is not used to the dryness of this country. She edges her mouth around the meat and swallows it whole. Tom looks down at his plate and slashes the fish with his fork.

The table is silent. Tom can hear her chewing. The indelicate chomping of her teeth and the loud gulp when she swallows. She continues chewing as she reaches for her water glass. They sit and stare at the girl. She takes a long swallow of water to wash the food down. Then she looks directly at his father and smiles — smiles so the rims of her teeth, which are small and white, show between her lips.

“I like it.”

He nods and smiles.

“Thomas caught the fish earlier today.”

He looks at his son. She follows the old man’s gaze and turns to look at Tom. She is still smiling. There is nothing timid about her now. Her eyes are bold and jumping. He looks into them and the corners of her mouth turn further upward. Like she is amused. Confused, he glares at her then looks down at his plate and forks up a mouthful of fish.

“Thomas is a natural fisherman. It is in his blood.”

Tom knows his father is making fun of him. The old man smiles at him. Tom nods and then looks away. It amuses the old man to mock his son in front of strangers. Not that Tom cares what Mr. Wallace and Mrs. Wallace and this girl think. He does not care in the least.

“Thomas is a young man of many abilities.”

Now his father is looking at the girl. He is still smiling. The girl is watching him and despite all her wiles she is in danger of growing fascinated. Tom can already tell. His father is more than twice her age but her eyes are pinned to his lips as he speaks to her in his fur-lined baritone. The old man cheats wild horses of their freedom with this voice. It runs deep into his chest, silky smooth and dry.

Tom dislikes the girl and is fearful of her. But he does not want her to her fall into the old man’s trap. Tom lives at the bottom of the trap. There is not very much space and he does not want to share his father with her. Tom has spent a lifetime watching people fall down the hole. He has never enjoyed the company. The girl looks at his father. She widens her eyes. It is too late, he thinks. She is already falling.

“Thomas can take you fishing some time. If you like.”

“I would like.”

She says the three words evenly and quickly. What she says — the would and the like—has nothing to do with fishing or with Tom or with anything that has been discussed at the table, anything that has been said out loud, since they arrived on the farm in their car.

Or perhaps it does. Have to do with everything that has happened since they arrived. Because now his father leans forward. His eyes rest on Tom and then return to the girl. He smiles. She smiles. The whole table smiles. Mr. Wallace and Mrs. Wallace sit back and for the first time that evening Mr. Wallace cracks a smile that is broad as daylight.

Only Tom does not smile. He glares at the dinner guests. They would do better to be cautious. They are beaming at his father — they grin and grin, mouths wide open — but they would do better to be aware of the situation they have walked into. Whatever that situation may be. The Wallaces are fools. They are no match for his father.

THE NEXT DAY Tom oversees the storage of the outdoor furniture. All summer the lawn and veranda are dotted with daybeds and settees. Today they gather the furniture from the lawn — the sign that the summer season is officially over. It is a full day’s work. The servants bring the tables and chairs to the veranda. The wood needs oiling and there are necessary repairs.

Tom stands in the middle of the fray. He directs the servants. He inspects the polish. He checks the removal of the stains. His father stops to observe the proceedings. He brushes a hand against the wood. It has been made to order in the style of the furniture back in the old country. A reminder of the separation between the farm and the rest of the country, it is also the separation itself. The barrier being made of furniture and teapots. The old man nods approval and waves to the servants to continue. Then he motions for Tom to follow.

They walk around the veranda and out to the lawn. His father stops and looks in the direction of the servants on the veranda. They are bent over the furniture. Two men pick up a table and move in the direction of the storeroom.

“That’s a good job.”

Tom is pleased. It is true it is a good job. He has exerted himself today, they all have. He notes that his father is in a good mood. Perhaps he slept well. The Wallaces left early, knowing better than to wear out their welcome. The farm is theirs again. Tom stands beside his father, in what he believes to be the glow of his approval.

The father invites the son to sit down. There are two chairs that have not been taken in, that stand forgotten in the middle of the lawn. Tom sits down. His father sits down next to him. He crosses his legs at the ankles. He folds his hands into a steeple and taps finger to knuckle. Buh buh buh. He sits and watches his son. He does not look out at the land. He does not look at the river, which is visible down the slope of land and through the trees. He looks at Tom.

“What do you think of Carine?”

Tom shrugs.

“She is pretty, no?”

Tom stares at his father. He cannot believe that his father can be serious about this girl and yet. And yet he is sitting here in this way, with his son, and he is telling him that he finds the girl pretty. He shakes his head. His father smiles and looks amused.

“No? Come, Thomas. You must admit that she is pretty.”

He shrugs again.

“For a country boy you have high standards.”

The old man pauses. Is watching him.

“Mrs. Wallace hoped you might take a fancy to the girl.”

His father, still watching him. The realization dawns on Tom. The girl is intended for him. That was the purpose of the visit. The meaning of the looks that passed between the Wallaces and his father. He does not easily believe it — he approaches the idea cautiously, because it is not often that the father thinks of the son.

But what does he think of the girl? The thought of her returns abruptly and he does not know what he thinks. He thinks of her pale skin and her small sharp teeth and before he knows it the girl is settling inside his mind. Turning and making a home for herself there. He shakes his head.

“Soon you will be running the farm.”

Tom looks up. His father has never said this, he has never put it into words. The promise has been understood but never actually stated. The date never articulated in terms such as soon. But now the old man has spoken the words and the difference is palpable, the difference is clear as daylight. Tom clears his throat. He tries to smile. He would like to thank his father but knows it would not be the thing. His father continues. More gently.

“You will. And when you do, a woman—”

He pauses, as if in consideration of his own past. He makes a minor correction.

“—a woman, of the right kind, will be a great help.”

He wonders if his father believes that the girl is a woman of the right kind. A woman of the right kind, for a certain kind of thing. The thought of the girl returns to him like a flood and she kicks inside his brain.

“I told Mrs. Wallace that I thought you were not opposed to the idea.”

He pauses.

“I thought that she liked you. Did you not?”

It has been decided. He hears the decision in his father’s voice. It is almost a comfort. For a second he thought his father was asking. The idea of the girl and the idea of his choice — a choice, the choice of a woman — had spread through his body like a rash. Now the idea is gone and his body is restored to health. He nods and considers the slope of land running to the river. Soon to be his.

“Take her fishing.”

A courting amongst the dorado — a terrible thought. Tom is now an excellent fisherman. On a good day he can outfish his father. He is slow and obstinate — good qualities in a fisherman. Whereas his father sees the sport as a contest of wills, a question of winning and domination. He is too easily drawn in. Tom only wants to capture the fish and bring it home and eat it.

It hardly matters. He is a good fisherman but he is still terrified of the fish. Everything about the animal is foreign to him. The gaping mouth and the razor sharp teeth — sharper than the teeth of any other animal, sharp in a way that has nothing to do with the necessities of the civilized world. The scales are so bright gold that he is sometimes blinded by the color of the fish, as in the brightness of the sun.

He will take her fishing. He will woo her on the river. His father has chosen. The old man watches him and then stands up and strides away. He does not say anything further. Tom sits and listens to the sound of his feet on the lawn. The lawn is empty and he hears the old man’s steps longer than is natural. It is oppressive but there is a comfort in it. Tom does not like to be alone.

HE TAKES THE girl fishing and a week later they are engaged. He does not know how the engagement happens. One minute they are fishing and the next Mr. Wallace and Mrs. Wallace are standing with his father on the veranda. There are champagne bottles being opened, toasts being made, and in the middle of it the girl. She wears the ring his father gave him to give her. His mother’s ring: the talisman of a failed contract.

Still, in the week since the engagement he has become painfully aware of the girl. Her presence brings on the migraine — he cannot think clearly, he needs to lie down. He thinks of her like this; he imagines stretching out beside her. He thinks he is in love with her. With this patch of land that will soon be his. It is small — a mere one foot by five feet and barely a hundred pounds — but it will be his, to do with as he likes. This plot of earth. That he will take to his bed as he likes, and keep close beside him.

A man feels a certain way toward his property. And Tom has never owned anything in his life. So he is in danger of being carried away, only he is a man both phlegmatic and wary. He does not know how to lose his head. He sees that the girl can look after herself. She lands on her feet like a cat dropped out a window. Being nimble in mind and body. But here she comes — she stands beside him, behind him, the fabric of her dress grazing his elbow, his hand, and it is hard not to feel what he feels. Her hair brushes against his shoulder and again he feels what he feels.

Although it has to be said. He can feel and feel away but the coupling, now official, is far from fully achieved. He has barely touched the girl. He is all too conscious of the fact. There was a churlish kiss — churlish on whose side? He hardly knows but suspects his own — in front of his father and the Wallaces. At the time of the champagne bottles and the toasts. And then very little since. He has touched her hand but not held it. Once he touched the small of her back.

She is cool and hard. Like marble or some other stone. He touches her neck and she leans back against the hand. Only for a second. The flesh is nonresponsive. It is like he is not even touching her, like his hand has been obliterated by her coldness. He puts his hand away. He admits that he does not know how to approach her. She is different from the others. Not that there have been any: Tom knows nothing about the ways of women.

It does not trouble him too much. There is enough time. There is all the time in the world! They will be married and then there will be many months, months and years and decades, in which to learn how best to approach the girl. He sees her like a piece of wild game. He is just circling and circling and taking his time. Eventually he will throw ropes around her neck and legs and yank her to the ground.

Meanwhile, the Wallaces are at the farm all the time, with all their civilization. They arrive in the afternoon for tea. They stay for dinner after tea. Lately the house is only empty in the morning. His father tolerates their company. He has found his son a mate. The change in routine is a small price to pay for it. Tom knows that his father does not like the Wallaces. Tom does not like them either. They sit on the chairs like they already belong to them, eyeing the silver, eating the food.

Checks are put into place. It will not do to let the Wallaces loose upon the farm. Mrs. Wallace goes so far as to ask Celeste to prepare a dish for supper. “The lamb we ate last week. Perhaps you could make it tonight?” As if she were already mistress of the house. The old man is obliged to send them away. The Wallaces do not come to the farm that day or the next. Nor does the girl. Tom becomes anxious without her. Finally his father telephones and orders them to send the girl to tea.

The girl comes alone. She has put on a fresh dress, bright yellow with a pattern of flowers. Hesitating, she steps onto the veranda and he comes forward to greet her. She says to him that she has already taken the dress in twice. She is shrinking, she is wasting away. It is the heat, she says. It is the food. She cannot find the food that she is used to here. She smiles at him and shrugs. He does not know what to say. It is true that her color is feverish. They are alone for the first time since they have been engaged.

Cautiously, she puts her hand on his arm. She is still smiling. He stares down at her and doesn’t move. She tightens her grip. She begins to angle his body closer to hers. He thinks that is what she is doing — he isn’t entirely sure. He feels panic. What does the girl want from him? What is it she expects? The panic grows and abruptly he shakes her hand off.

The girl does not look especially surprised. She smiles and looks away. With one hand she smooths the front of her dress. He watches her hand flutter down its surface. Up and then down again. Tom longs for his father, who would know what to do. The girl continues to brush at her lap, now frowning a little. She removes an invisible hair, dangles it from her fingers, drops it to the ground.

He says to her that he will go find his father. She is silent for a moment and then as he turns to go, she tells him not to. Her voice rises and then falters. She is asking him not to go. They stare at each other. She walks forward a little and then she places her hand on his chest. He stares down at the hand. Which is small and not particularly clean. Abruptly, he steps away.

“Can I get you something to drink?”

“Fine. Yes.”

“What would you like?”

“Gin.”

He nods and walks to the drinks trolley. Gin, for the first time gin. When before it was juice and water. Suddenly he cannot wait to be away from her. The air on the veranda is thick with the smell of the girl. Her translucent touch. He cannot think straight. He picks up a glass.

“How do you take it?”

“On the rocks.”

He nods. He pours in the gin. The girl is sitting now. He gives her the drink. She takes it from his hand while averting her gaze. He sits down across from her and crosses his legs at the ankles. He is aware that he has failed. The girl will not even look at him. So there it is. Two weeks ago his father asked did he not think the girl pretty. Now she is here in the house and he is half wondering how to make her leave.

He says that he will go to find his father and this time she lets him go. She drops her hand through the air to show him just how little she cares. He can go hang himself for all she cares, that is what she is saying. Concealment not being part of the game at present, whatever game it is they are playing. She adjusts her legs, slyly, silk brushing against silk, and does not watch him as he goes.

He finds his father at the front of the house. He has just returned from examining the pools in the river. He is wearing his work clothes and his shirt is open to expose his barrel-chested girth. Tom tells him that the girl is here. He nods and then asks Tom why he is not with her. Before Tom responds he strides through the hall, his boots leaving long streaks of mud on the floor.

Tom makes a note to himself to tell Jose to clean the marks up. Now, immediately. While they are easy to wipe away. He turns to look for Jose. He walks the house in a hurry, looking for him. He finds him at last, out back, and he whispers the instructions. About the mud. In the hall. Then he returns to the veranda.

The girl stands, back against a pillar, dress lifting on the wind, and she does not turn at the sound of Tom’s footsteps. He stops at the door. His father is at the liquor trolley. He pours with a steady hand. He picks the girl’s drink up from the table and hands it to her. She takes it with a nod. The old man does not look at her. He stands beside her and takes in her view. He takes of her space. Eventually, she turns to him.

Tom watches, from the doorway. He stares, from the darkness. And then he leaves them. He goes to see that Jose has wiped away the mud and that dinner is prepared for three. When he tells him, Jose does not have the courtesy to look surprised. He says to him the table has already been set.

HIS FATHER BEDS the girl every night for the next three weeks. A native brings her two trunks. The Wallaces themselves do not appear. His father has made some arrangement — clearly his father has made some arrangement. It is true the girl has no reputation to lose and it is also true the situation does not necessarily look so bad. She is engaged to Tom. She has a place on the farm while she recovers her health and then there is the difficulty of adjusting to the life in the valley.

Which is different. Different to what she knows and not so different after all. Because she has already found her way. She is a girl who lands on her feet.

Tom walks the house and does his best to avoid her. Naturally he runs into her at every turn. She wanders the halls in a state of growing undress. A hair ribbon that has come undone, a strap that has fallen loose. It gets worse — much worse, until she is walking the halls, dragging herself from room to room, draping herself on the chairs and settees in nothing more than the excuse of a dressing gown. Sometimes not even that. Sometimes nothing more than a chemise and Tom swears it is worse than if she had been naked.

She is like a bitch in heat. The same smell comes off the animals during mating season. Then they run across the land, eyes rolling back in their heads, sick and made foul with desire. They have to lock the dogs away when they are like this. There is nothing else for it. They should do the same to the girl only it is too late and the fever has already set in. Into all of them, into the walls of the house.

Soon, within a matter of days, she finds her way into his mother’s wardrobe. Silk dresses and fur wraps and clothes, clothes far more costly than those she arrived in. Now every evening she dresses for dinner. She puts on a chiffon frock, she draws the tasseled belt tight. The colors are rich and the fabrics delicate and they are cut in the complicated way that means quality. Tom has an eye for such things. Generally useless but now put into practice.

He scans her every night and soon he notices that there are jewels, there are diamonds and emeralds, hanging from her slender wrist and neck, tucked up into her hair. She arrives with tortoiseshell clips and sapphire rings, she is practically glittering when she comes down to dinner, a shiny, ghostly apparition in his mother’s clothes. There are clear differences between the two women. Nonetheless, Tom sees his father’s gaze clamp onto her.

Now his father walks her to the table each night. She sits between Tom and his father, Tom at one end of the table, his father at the other, and the girl sitting between them. She will take Tom’s place. In no time she will be sitting across from the old man and presiding over the table. With her newfound airs and graces. Already she is playing the lady of the house and is surprisingly good at it.

Every night he walks the halls and there is a nightmare of sounds emanating from his father’s bedroom. Sickly moans and thumps in the night. Suckling and animal bellowing. The stuff of nightmares, which he remembers from childhood. He stands outside his father’s door. He lowers his head and listens. The noise is loud, the house and all the rooms are full with things, bureaus and sofas and carpets, but the sound travels just like the building is hollow.

He does not know how he will face the girl in the morning and still he does. Every morning she looks smug and suddenly well fed. Stuffed — that is one way of putting it. He understands some things about the situation. That he was marked for the fool from the start. That this was always part of the plan. That they are right to view him with contempt. No doubt they are laughing at him now, from the dampness of their bed.

Father knows best. The scales on Tom’s skin erupt for the first time in many years. It is a bad attack. He cannot sleep for the itching. He patrols the house instead, scratching at his hands, he does it for hours and it is only when the sun is rising that he goes to bed. His bedroom is on the opposite side of the house to his father’s. There are hundreds of yards between them. But now he goes to bed and the sounds follow him to sleep. He hears it all — the mysterious thumping, the shouts and moans, the loud, loud bellowing.

3

Across the border there is a mountain — and one morning the mountain explodes. First there is an enormous boom. The boom is not hollow but dense with noise. The natives come out of their quarters. They are standing outside, looking and listening, when the boom repeats and then dissolves into a rumble. They are watching when the top of the mountain opens and disgorges fire.

They have never seen this before. Violence from men they understand well, but from the land itself — the mountain now retching, the innards of the earth shooting up — they do not know what to think or how to understand it. A giant cloud of smoke pushes up and covers the sky. Bolts of lightning snap through the cloud. A column of red and orange forms in the middle. The fire pours straight into the sky and fills it.

They feel the explosions that follow from across the border. The ground bucking beneath their feet. They thrust their hands into the air. They try to regain balance. The explosions follow in quick succession and above them the sky is purple and orange and gray and white. They watch. Their hands are shaking and they kneel — are thrust to the ground — in prayer. Even the ones who have no religion to speak of.

The volcano erupts for four days. In the chaos of the four days and darkness the farmers let go of their routine. The livestock go unfed and then are fed at strange hours of the night. It makes them bellow in fear. They stampede across the lot and then huddle together and then stampede again. Also, they shit constantly. Streams of shit pouring out of their bodies as they squeal and grunt.

The natives are sent out to calm the herds. They press themselves between the animal bodies. They step into soft piles of shit — the shit goes as high as their ankles, it goes as high as their calves. They stroke and soothe and croon but cannot take their eyes from the sky. They wonder if it will last forever. If it will never stop. The animals can sense their distraction and are not comforted.

When four days pass the mountain’s contractions slow. It takes another two days for the cloud to ease and they see patches of sky for the first time. There is sunlight. The contractions slow again and then stop. The animals are calm — the natives and farmers alike take that to be a sign, but they still doubt the sun and sky. Four days and they are numb to the life that came before.

The mountain had been silent for a thousand years. They did not know it could explode. They had been trained to worry about other things. The ravages of colonialism. Man-made apocalypse, nuclear disaster — they have seen pictures, they have heard stories. They are not educated people in the valley and the natives in particular are prone to modern superstition. They worry about their skin and hair and wonder if they will drop dead in ten years’ time, a reaction delayed.

They are reading the wrong signs. The right signs have nothing to do with history or culture. Two days before the eruption the snakes fled down the mountain. They slid, then dropped into the river and drowned. Within hours they were washing up on the dirt banks of the river. Stiff and twisted like small branches of wood, their bodies rigid in death.

The news of the snakes moved slowly. The villagers in the neighboring country were too busy gathering the bodies of the snakes, which they collected with their bare hands in baskets and then threw onto the fire like wood. They were too busy and so the volcano came to the valley first, before the news of the snakes that slithered down the mountain. The news of the snakes came with the ash. The ash and the slow clearing sky.

ON THE EIGHTH day the ash arrives in the country. It is quiet for four days. The mountain belching only a pocket or two of black smoke. The ground staying still. But then the ash happens.

It creeps across the border and into the country. It does it in the night, by stealth. The farmers in the valley wake and there is a thick layer of gray on the ground and in the air. They are baffled. It looks like snow but it is still hot outside and the gray is too fine. It is hard to see, almost invisible to the eye. Like a dry fog. Dry to the touch and everywhere in the air. They wave their hands through the air and their skin is parched.

By noon the valley is lost to a blizzard of ash. The children and the local imbeciles put on swimming trunks and goggles and run through the ash. They try to make balls of it. The ash balls fall to pieces in their hands and they throw handfuls of dust instead. They run across the fields and their feet slip and they choke on the dust. In places they fall to their waists in ash. They are laughing like loons, their minds cracked.

The ash continues to fall and the layer grows higher. It does not freeze into solid tranches. It does no melting of any kind. It only accumulates. The roads and tracks close themselves up. The car motors eat up dust and die. The bicycle wheels do not turn. They try to clear paths but the ash keeps falling. It is up to their waists, up to their necks. Two children disappear into the ash and are not found.

After two days, there is a brief respite in the ash fall and the men go out into the landscape. They try to clear paths. They fill wheelbarrows with the ash and cart it away, briefly they try to make order of it. Then the storm picks up and the ash plain grows higher and they retreat inside again. From the houses the windows show nothing but a field of gray without sky or ground. They look out the windows and give up. They bar themselves in their homes and watch the ash horizon climb up the walls of the houses.

One week later the ash slows. The farmers and natives step out into the monochrome landscape. Which was once their home. Which is all they know. They wear scarves and gas masks to protect themselves from the swirl of ash in the air. The particles minute and lingering. Then they embark on the task of rescuing the landscape from the ash. Digging it out like an archeological site: the evidence of their lives.

The real miracle is the fact that so many of the animals survived. The prescient put them in the barns. They left a native to stay with them through the ash storm. Feeding them daily. Avoiding them when they bucked and stomped in panic. Finally the ash stops falling and they release them into the open air. Onto the gray plain. Their legs buckle and their knees give into the dust. But they press forward, they find their footing, and disappear across the field.

THE FIRST DAY the mountain exploded, the old man held drinks at the farm. Among the whites, across the valley, there was a mood of hilarity. The girl said that company was what they needed and word was sent out. Dinner was ordered and the liquor trolley stocked. The neighboring whites — those who remained and were not afraid to travel — came at dusk and Jose served drinks on the veranda.

The men came without their wives, this being no time for a woman to travel. They stood with a drink in their hand and admired the view. On the whole the old man did not fraternize with these small landowners. These whites owned small plots of land and were therefore considered grasping. They had survived in the land through bluntness and cunning and were now starting to come into their own, what with the change taking place in the province.

They were men suited to this new age of violence. They were mobile and unreliable, with a reputation for physical brutality. There were fistfights and beatings on their farms and there had been shootings. The old man said they were men who did not understand the boundaries of behavior. But the girl liked society and they were now what passed for society in the valley. Therefore they had been invited to the farm.

It was almost a gathering like the old days, before the first departures and the unrest, before the rumors of possible rebellion. There was candlelight and crystal. There was in front of them a vast expanse of land. However, the men were tense. They stood on the veranda and watched the mountain tear into the sky. They talked but mostly drank from nervousness. They began with cocktails and then there was wine at dinner. After dinner there were ports and liqueurs.

The girl played jazz records on the gramophone and watched as the nervous men grew drunk. The scene loosened into a facsimile of the life back home. A poor one, the blacks and grays blurring into the white. A certain amount of play acting being involved. That play acting being imprecise. The girl smiled when the men made toasts to the mountain. She smiled again when the old man brought out a box of cigars and the men made toasts to the cigars.

Jose filled their glasses. The night progressed. The men were drunk but still restrained. The girl also. She had no intention of being reckless. She stood up and walked the veranda. She was not wearing very much. Her body exposed by her dress (his mother’s dress). Tom watched her and grew an ache in his throat and groin. She saw him watching and went to the old man. She sat down beside him on a stool.

In the morning, the men were still on the veranda. They had passed out in their armchairs. The old man ordered lunch for the party. The men nodded thanks without getting to their feet, and did not think of leaving the farm. Then it was noon and the sky was still dark and lit with fire. Lightning cracked up through the sky. They could see rivers of lava and the black cap of smoke continued to grow up above.

The men sat in the old man’s house and watched the mountain explode. Jose moved down the line of armchairs. He pushed a cart of drinks and then brought trays of cold food. The men ate and drank. The air now bearing permissiveness of a new kind. The men visibly inhaling it. It was hot, and they untucked and unbuttoned their shirts. There was not much conversation. One of the men said they might bring their wives for dinner, the roads seeming safe enough. He used the telephone to ring back to his farm and word was sent round.

There were eight men on the veranda that day and all eight stayed into the night. At dusk their wives were driven to the farm by their natives. They had dressed for the special occasion. With satin dresses and wraps to protect against the night air. A table was set in the dining room and dinner was served. Now that the women had come the atmosphere of nervous privilege was restored. The men made toasts to that privilege and proceeded to drink themselves blind.

After dinner the gramophone was switched on again and there was dancing and more drink. The girl came down after dinner. She had stayed in her room all day — trays were sent at mealtimes and endless pots of tea — but now she emerged. She was wearing a new dress, she had arranged her hair so that it looked like it was falling but was not. There was rouge on her cheeks and lips and she had put kohl on her eyes and smelled strongly of scent.

She was not even the most beautiful woman on the veranda. But she wove through the crowd and she had been emboldened by the previous night and there are things besides beauty. For example, the drunken lust of men. Which filled the veranda. Having been so good, the girl was now restless. The presence of the other women had spurred her instinct for competition. Therefore she moved across the veranda and she made the other women disappear. Nothing doing with their lace and ribbon and powder.

Abruptly, the old man stood up. He announced he was retiring for the night. He had no intimation of what was to come, such a thing being impossible for his arrogance to fathom. The other men nodded and watched him disappear across the veranda. The sour stench rising from their armpits. They had done no more than stand in the washroom and sponge their faces and necks. Their clothes still smelled of alcohol and animal must. They were forgetting where they were and making themselves at home.

Always a bad sign. The gramophone cranked. The girl danced down the length of the veranda. The men watched with drunken intent and the women watched, too. The girl did not notice about the men but did about the women. She laughed. Never having had a husband, she had therefore never worried about losing one. She was a little drunk. One of the women abruptly rose to her feet and crossed the veranda.

The other women followed. They were not going to sit and watch their husbands with the girl. The husbands’ thoughts being legible to the wives. The wives knowing what the husbands were capable of, having had a lifetime to learn. The women were outraged but the outrage was a cover — there were things happening that they had no interest in seeing. As they left they were aware of having stayed too long as was.

The men were left alone with the girl and she gave a special shimmy to celebrate her victory. Laughter rang out across the veranda. The girl turned up the volume on the gramophone and said something about cigars. One of the men found the box and lighter. The girl passed the box around and the men lit their cigars. Which smoldered and smoked as they watched her. She had stopped dancing and stood smiling as she rubbed her wrists against the jut of her hip.

The record on the gramophone clicked off. The men smoked their cigars in silence and looked at the girl. When they had met her the day before she had stood between the old man and his son and blushed for the duration of the introduction. They hadn’t known what to think. The girl seemed simple enough but what was happening between the two men was nothing simple. Not a rivalry as such. For a time they could not understand it.

But now that confusion lifted and they saw the girl for what she was: a spreader of unrest and confusion. The girl was a woman. She was a body — just a body, and evidently a gifted one. All the parts being in working order. The shoulder and neck, the legs and waist and back. (The girl also enjoyed her body. She had faith in it. It was hard as a rock and impenetrable, and thus far it had served her well.)

The girl stood before the men. One stood and came to her and she smiled as he approached. He laid a hand on her shoulder. Gently, he pushed one strap down and then the other. In a manner that was almost inconsequential. He chucked her under the chin and looked into her face. The girl was still smiling as he stepped back and looked at his handiwork and then the girl stopped.

Doubt crossed her face, if anyone had been there to notice. But there was no one — the room was empty in that respect. So the doubt stayed on her face. Doubt as to what was presently unfolding. It was on her face when she kicked off one shoe and then the other shoe (they were pinching, they were hurting so, she did not think she could stay in them one second longer). It was on her face as the shoes skittered across the floor and came to a stop.

The men stared at the shoes. They were tiny. Tiny things of leather and satin. There was a logic to the shoes. Quality and all that. Standards. Propriety. Everything that was currently escaping them — the very idea of being civilized itself — as they sat in their armchairs and watched the girl. They stared at the shoes and then they raised their eyes and looked at the girl.

WHO WAS NOT having an easy time of it and therefore kept her head high and her back rigid. She was conscious of the cool tile beneath her bare feet. The gust of wind through her armpits. The dress was now hanging off her nipples, her nipples were now all that stood between decency and nakedness and lucky for her they were spectacularly erect. Her nipples were a matter of note. Always had been.

She laughed. It sounded hysterical in the silence and she stopped, mouth dry. Truth be told her sense of humor had deserted her. There was plenty to laugh about but she wasn’t laughing. She could see the humor, she could see the jokes and punch lines. A woman standing in front of a man, that was already good for some laughs. But she was not in the mood for laughter. She shivered, even though it was hot.

One month ago she arrived in the country and she saw there was nothing here she could not handle, nothing beyond the arid air. She had been warned that it was wild country going wilder, but she had already survived the drawing rooms at home. Home being a ruthless territory, cruelty on display with the silk and china. She had almost been relieved by the barren expanse of country. She had not thought — did not think — that men could be changed by means of landscape.

But now here she was and for the first time she sensed that this was something different, of which she did not have the measure. Something she did not currently understand. Later she would look back on this moment and she would see that there were a hundred things she might have done, at this moment as with any moment, at this moment which was just like any other moment. But then her mind was blank. Small and hard and blank. Like a pebble. Her mind was a pebble. Nothing adhered to its surface.

So she did what she always did. When her mind was blank, when the sickness set in, when her skin began to itch and burn. What she always did, a woman’s only purchase on power. She took her clothes off. She reached up her hands and undid the hook and eye closure. She pulled down the zipper of her dress, this cunningly designed dress, more expensive than anything she had ever owned.

It was going to happen anyway so she might as well be the one to do it. Not that she was a fatalist but the zipper slid down without protest and now the dress was hanging off her back. Taking off your clothes was easy. Putting them back on was the hard part. Now look. She was down to her skivvies and they were not clean. It didn’t matter. She could sing a song and nobody would notice. Children should be seen and not heard. The saying referred strictly to the girls, the girls who would grow up to be ladies.

Not that she was a lady. She was, however, a product of her society. It was getting hard to think, hard to figure it out, because now there was wetness growing. A slick between her legs and the thrall of physical longing. Well, a woman felt the weight of a man looking, a woman liked to be wanted, and here were several men, here a group of men. Who could see the wetness for all she knew.

She exhaled and tried to keep her head straight. Lust and the mistakes that were made in its wake. A trail of them, each bigger than the last. Desire was what plagued women, it was what tripped them up. She thought: a woman should seek out dry land. Be rid of lust at last. Which made nothing good or clear. Which only gathered around a woman, inutile and collecting dust. Men did not like the women who wanted it. Men would rather force themselves on the women who didn’t. The logic being dismal but clear.

At the same time, a man would take what he could get and always did. One of the men stood up. She raised her head to look at him. He was plain, he was nothing as a man. He moved slowly, with both hands spread before him. Like he thought she was a rabbit or a rabid animal. She watched and saw the gleam flicker into his eyes. Her body relaxed a notch. After all they were men. After all they were the same. She smiled and then she watched his face harden in front of her and the smile died on her lips.

She stood in the blast of hunger that came from his body and the hatred coming from his eyes. Hatred for her as a woman. She became afraid. Panic swung through her body and then she changed her mind. A woman can change her mind, she thought. A woman can get wet between the legs and loosen her dress and she still has the right to change her mind. Doesn’t she? Isn’t that what they said?

She felt the situation slipping out of her control. She stumbled and tried to guess at the damage. There was the old man. They were afraid of him — that could work for her or against her, likely against. She had seen the store of resentment in the faces of the men. Built over time and carefully fortified. Brick by brick and then the wall broke and wiped out whatever stood in its way. Due to either bad luck or stupidity.

She had made a situation for herself on the farm and a good one. But now it was turning to mud and faster than she could believe. It was not fate and not inevitable but it was what was going to happen. Now the man was standing in front of her. He walked his eyes across her body and then to her face. The interest being more knot than attraction. His lust being caught up in complicated things. Like power and shame and fear. She thought: we are not so different. I know you, there are things that we share.

She wasn’t even convincing herself. His gaze slid around her neck to her back and his body followed, his body circled round. He stood behind her. She closed her eyes as he gripped her neck. With the other hand he yanked her to him. Held her by the neck and pushed her dress aside. Rooted downstairs. Poked a finger in. Slapped it with an open hand. Hard, not teasing like, not affectionate. She gasped and winced in pain. She thought: surely not here, in front of all of them. Surely not like this.

He unbuckled his trousers and shoved right into her but she was wet so it wasn’t rape. Which gave him no pleasure or less pleasure or a different pleasure to the one he was wanting. So that was a point for the girl. Just one but who was counting, you grasped at straws when you were trying to keep your head on your shoulders. Now he was calling her a whore cunt bitch but she’d heard it all before. Nothing new under the sun, nothing he could tell or show her. With his idiot thrusting. Like a dog or rat or pig. Quick as a dog, too, and it was on to the next one.

So that was how it was going to be. So she was going to be sore but she had her pills. A whole bottle of them on the bed stand in her room. One of the men slapped her face and pushed her to the ground. She concentrated on the pills. She should have counted how many. How many pills and how many men. In case there was an equivalence lurking in the numbers. Back when this began, which already felt like a long time ago.

Were they all going to take their turn? Was every one of them going to line up for a poke and a stab? Or had some of the group left — scared by what they wanted to see and what they would imagine for weeks to come, what they almost saw and did. She tried to keep count. It took her mind off things, which were quickly becoming painful back there. Desire ran out on you and then the fucking started. You could disconnect but there was nothing like pain to bring you back.

Not that she wanted them to stop. She couldn’t think a thought so clearly. She couldn’t think her way past the situation at hand, she could no longer fathom what happened next.

To give her credit: she was not waiting to be saved. She was not waiting for the shout of a man coming to save her from another man. (Which would have had nothing to do with her. A man saved a woman and he was only saving some idea of himself. A man was nothing but a continent of ideas. Whereas a woman lived on shifting ground. Therefore it was easy to slip between the cracks. They’d been warning her since she was a child. She couldn’t say she hadn’t been told.)

There was no sound of feet. No slam of door. No anger. No stopping. It went on. What a body can take is always more than a body can take until it isn’t. Until the body says it can do no more. Her body went past that point and she knew nothing about it. Her head had disconnected from her body and was floating in space. Her arms and legs were next and then it was just her torso — she’d forgotten her torso, she had left it behind. With the wolf pack snapping at her heels. Snapping and then biting and then eating and she was gone.

Outside, the mountain was decapitated by flame. The smoke cloud blotted out the sky. None of the men on the veranda looked at the mountain. They were otherwise occupied.

4

In the morning five men left and three stayed behind. The five who left woke early. They dressed by low light and went downstairs, whispering and motioning in silence. Tiptoeing in their socks. They found the old man sitting at a table on the veranda eating breakfast. In the background the volcano was still electric orange and the sky was still black.

They came to the table with their boots in their hands and told the old man they were going. They had their own farms to attend to. The old man nodded. They thanked him for his hospitality. He offered them breakfast. It was a visible afterthought. The men said no. The old man nodded and turned back to his paper. News came to the valley late, the papers a week old by the time they reached the farm.

The five men pulled on their boots and were silent as they went down the veranda steps. Once they got to the track their gait relaxed. When they got a little further one of them started to whistle. A tune from last night’s gramophone. A little snippet of song. The others joined in. They formed a five-part harmony and galloped down the road.

Five men left and three stayed behind. Like Job’s comforters. They appeared at noon, each grasping a sheet of newspaper. They stood on the veranda and surrounded the old man. Who sat rooted in his chair. He did not consider himself to be trapped, he showed no evidence of that belief. But he remained surrounded by the men all day, unable to shake them off and wearing an expression of deepening outrage.

Tom did not understand what was going on. Tom had not been on the veranda the previous night. He had been on the other side of the house. Confined to his bedroom with a severe case of indigestion. He spent the evening lying on the bed in a sweat. Every ten minutes he lurched to the toilet and emptied his bowels. Temporarily relieved, he dragged himself back to the bed, only to lurch up again shortly after.

This kind of thing was always happening to Tom. The result was always the same: Tom was the only one who did not know. He woke in the morning and noticed that something was wrong. Half the men had gone and the men who stayed were different. They had changed overnight. They were emboldened and they patrolled the house like they had the owning of it. They were no longer shamed by the old man, by the house and the farm, but Tom did not understand why.

He did not see the girl all day but that was not unusual. She slept until evening and did not like to be disturbed. Tom had often thought: a man could murder her in the night and the body would not be found until next evening. A man could creep into her room and take a cleaver to her head. Be away by morning, in a new country by noon. It could be done. There had been rumors of such things. They would spend days looking for a bloodstained native.

Tom had a bad sense of humor. Another one of his flaws. However, the humor was intermittent, a nervous habit that soon gave way to anxiety. Two days passed and still the girl did not appear. He asked Celeste about it. She said the girl was indisposed and then shook her head. Tom asked if they should call for a doctor and she shook her head again. Ah no, she said. No doctors. No doctors, he repeated. No doctors.

Tom looked for his father. He found him on the veranda with the three men. The sight of the old man surrounded unnerved Tom. He thought: the presence of the men and the absence of the girl. He did not go out onto the veranda but he stood and saw. His father’s face red with anger as he read the newspaper again and again. One of the men leaned forward, his hand on the old man’s shoulder. Tom strained to hear his words.

“You see it right there.”

The old man did not respond.

“You see the steps that are being taken.”

“I see nothing.”

The man leaned back and crossed his arms.

“The Government will concede.”

The old man looked up angrily.

“On what authority? To whose demands?”

The man remained calm. He smiled and pried the newspaper from the old man’s hands. The old man’s face darkened at the audacity. The man ignored him. He folded the paper in two and tucked it into his pocket for safekeeping. Then he looked down at the old man.

“Try to imagine it. If we do not make concessions, they will tear this country to pieces.”

Tom shook his head and stepped away. It was no time to be worrying about the news. Going over the matter of the unrest yet again. Four days after the mountain began to erupt and two days after the girl took ill, the volcano stopped. Across the valley there was relief. But on the farm the situation remained unchanged. The men showed no signs of departing. And the old man strangely powerless against them.

It was like the farm had seized up with cramp. It needed to be moved back into life. Grasped by the middle and jolted. It was not something Tom could do, it needed the old man’s force. There never having been anything like this before. As it was, Tom was already unnerved. He did not like having strangers in the house. He was constantly moving from room to room in order to avoid them. While the old man remained fixed to the veranda, examining the week-old newspaper.

Tom went to Jose and told him they would ride to the High Point. From there they would be able to see the mountain and assess how the land had been damaged. The old man prided himself on his knowledge of the land. His best self was a man patrolling his land astride a horse. He was therefore bound to join them. In this way Tom would recover his father. He would detach him from the rubber grip of the three men.

However, Tom’s plan failed. He went to the old man’s study early the next morning and found the old man already surrounded by his comforters. Tom had never seen a stranger in his father’s rooms. Now there were three. Three, standing in the room. Sitting on the desk. Looking out the window. Tom stopped at the door and could go no further. His father looked up.

“What is it?”

“We are going to the High Point.”

His father nodded. He didn’t move.

“When?”

“Now. Or when you like.”

A pause. His father looked down at the sheets of paper on the desk. He shuffled them vaguely. Tom kicked at the doorjamb for his attention.

“Will you join us?”

His father shook his head. He did not look up — he waved Tom away with his eyes still on the papers. Tom backed out of the room. He turned and heard the air whistling through his ears. He almost stumbled in the hall but righted himself. He went to meet Jose at the stables. They led their rides out in silence. It was only when they had mounted the horses that Jose turned to him.

“Where is he?”

“He’s not coming.”

Jose nodded. He did not look surprised and did not say anything further. Although they had been brought up together, of the same age and both nursed at Celeste’s tit, Jose was a mystery to Tom. Fatherless Jose, halfway an orphan, who nonetheless understood things Tom could not comprehend. When Tom looked at Jose he saw nothing but an opaque surface: the obstruction of things Jose knew, that Tom could not hope to know. In silence, they turned the horses out and headed to the High Point.

In the wake of the volcano, the landscape was muted but not quiet. There were sounds throughout and the sky had the density of the ocean. Tom thought: there was water everywhere, and waves up in the sky. Around them the farm was calm. As they climbed they could see the force of the old man’s imprint on the terrain: the fences corralling the fields, the plow marks in the dirt. The sky churned overhead but down on the surface things were almost as before. The horses shied when a hawk swooped down across the path. The two men calmed the horses and pressed forward up the valley.

They reached the High Point ten minutes later. There, the landscape reared up violently. The ground a lunging beast but worse. The mountain looming in front of them, the top blown off and rivulets of lava still flowing. Tom looked across at it. He realized that things had changed. The ground had come undone and lacked all coherence, it rolled forward in senseless disorder. They had seen none of it from the valley. They’d had no idea of its scale.

It was like they had crossed into another world. Tom in particular was not prepared. He did not have the tools to understand what he now saw. He had never been anywhere in his life. Barely having left the farm, a city street would have struck him like a miracle.

“What will happen now?”

He barely spoke the words, he wasn’t sure he said them at all. Jose shook his head.

“No person knows.”

“What does that mean?”

“There has never been anything like this.”

Tom looked down at the river. He could see that it was black and brown with debris. Close to the mountain it hardly seemed to run at all. As if it had turned to mud. As if it would turn to stone. The mud river, the stone river, ran down from the mountain and toward the border. Over the border and into their land. Quickly, Tom looked at Jose.

“There is something wrong with the river.”

Jose took a long time in responding. Then Tom realized he was not going to respond at all. He was not looking at the river but up at the sky. He was staring at its churning brightness like he was waiting to go blind.

“What is it?”

He shook his head.

“What is it?”

Tom spoke more forcefully this time. Jose stared at the ground and still did not respond. Then he shook his head.

“Nothing good.”

“Nothing good? That’s all you have to say?”

Jose nodded.

“Nothing good.”

“About the river? Are you talking about the river? There is something wrong with it.”

“Nothing good about nothing.”

Tom kicked the horse and it bolted down the path. After a second, he heard Jose follow. Tom laughed. To have asked so many times. To have made himself ridiculous. What had made him think the man knew something, something about the mountain and the farm, something Tom could not see? If the natives had instinct, they had cunning, and the two added up to nothing.

His father never had these difficulties. He gave orders and the natives listened because they knew the old man had no want he could not satisfy himself. Tom was different. He could do nothing of his own. He needed the servants and they were aware of this, having had many years to realize the fact. Tom was their superior but on the farm they were all subordinate to the old man. However. Tom reminded himself that would change, that would all be changing, soon. His father had promised him as much.

He was calmed by the thought. They took the horses down the slope and to the stables. The horses were skittish. They tossed their heads and once Tom was almost unseated. When they returned to the house they saw the men on the veranda. His father looked up when Tom approached. He said that they should order dinner for five. Beef, as there was no fish. He supposed there was still the foie gras and the caviar. He said to bring out whatever was left.

That night, the ash began. It happened in the middle of the night. Tom was asleep. He woke to the sound of footfall. People banging doors in the night. He pulled on his trousers and stepped into the hall. The servants were running, shouting to each other. He pulled on his shirt and hurried after them. Out in the main rooms of the house it was chaos. Everyone was awake. He spun around and grabbed the nearest person.

“What is it? What has happened?”

He was speaking to some boy — the foreman’s son, he thought. The boy shook his head. He pointed outside. Over the veranda. The air outside was white with ash. He dropped the boy’s arm at the sight of it. He did not understand. It fell thick as snow but he knew immediately that this was no snowfall. He had never seen such fine stuff airborne. It fell like rain then swirled like snow. The rapid shifts incomprehensible to him.

He looked down at his feet. He watched the ash scurry into the house. A fine coating on the lawn. A little heap on the steps. The ash was ten feet away. As he watched it came closer, covering inches and then feet within a matter of seconds. He stood still and watched as the dust swept to his toes and then over his feet like he was sculpture in a garden.

He swung his head up to look outside: the air was stiller than before. It had grown thicker. More opaque. The lights from the house lit the dust several yards deep. Then the world dropped into darkness. He could see nothing of it. No shadow or contour — it was not normal, it was not natural, this dark.

He was now coated in dust to his calves. It unfolded like a scene from the horror movies he watched as a child. They gave him deep and penetrating nightmares — his father used to laugh at the way the terror made him cower from sleep. The way it made him wet his bed in the night. Tom looked past the veranda in the direction of the river. He grabbed another passing boy by the arm.

“Where is my father? Is he awake?”

The boy stared at him. He shook him hard.

“Go and wake him. Go and get him.”

The boy didn’t move.

“Go!”

The boy turned and scurried away. The boy had not left the room before the old man emerged in boots and a dressing gown, his hair disheveled. He didn’t look at Tom. He barreled forward across the hall. He crossed the veranda, jumped down the steps and into the airborne sea of ash. He disappeared in an instant and was gone. Tom peered through the mist. His father had been swallowed by the swell of ash. There was no trace of him at all.

Beside him, two servants were shouting to each other. They spoke too quickly for him to hear.

“What is it?”

They turned to him.

“The dust — he will not be able to breathe. It will get into his eyes. His lungs.”

He stared at them for a moment. Then he lunged forward across the veranda and into the dust. Some of the men followed him. The last thing he heard was their feet moving on the stone floor behind him. Then he was enveloped by the dust. In an instant he heard and saw nothing. He was only floating through space. It was quiet, he had dreamed of it as a child, sometimes it came to him still — the dream of being untethered.

An instant later his mouth was full of dust and he was choking, coughing, splattering up tears and phlegm. He stumbled over the ash — there were mounds of it across the ground, several inches in places, gathering with speed. He flung his arms out. Like he was looking for a wall to lean against. He felt the men enter the cloud of dust behind him — insulated explosions, the sign of distant movement. The silence remained unbroken.

His eyes — now open to slivers — adjusted and he saw things. Gradations of color. Pools of light. He stumbled forward, arms spread wide. He called for his father. Ash flew into his mouth and he coughed again. He heard nothing. There was only a dense and regular throbbing. The ash already too much. He squeezed his eyes and mouth shut, he pressed his palms into his face, trying to cough out the dust.

Tears streamed down his face. He was finding it hard to breathe, he saw for the first time that he might suffocate. He told himself he knew the land well. Each inch of soil and every rock beyond was familiar to him. He pressed forward. He knew his father had gone to the river. There was nowhere else he could have gone. He had seen it in the old man’s face — once he had seen the ash in the air and on the ground.

The other men carried electric torches and now the light bounced through the darkness. He saw one of them in the mist. A man standing in a pool of light. It was Jose. He was bare-chested and had wrapped his shirt around his head. He stopped and motioned to Tom. He waved his hand through the air, around his head. His hand, coated in dust. Tom stripped off his shirt and wrapped it, mimicking Jose, around his mouth and eyes. He breathed easier, into the cotton fabric of his shirt.

He left one eye uncovered and using this one eye he continued in the direction of the river. The landscape had grown alien. He had never seen any of what he saw now. The ground he had always known — this place, the only thing he had ever seen or understood — had vanished. He accepted that he knew nothing of where he was. He thought this was what blindness must be like. Nothing complete or total. The field, constantly shifting, and small gradations of light and shadow.

Then he saw a fragment of the old man. An arm that appeared and then disappeared. A smear of movement that was his back. He saw, in fragments, through the dust: the old man in trouble. He lurched forward toward the shape. Guided by his single eye, his single eye straining to hold the fragments in place. To keep the movement in sight. He started running, knees buckling, arms flailing.

His father dropped out of his field of vision. He stopped and looked around him. He yanked the shirt from his face and shouted.

“Father!”

The dust flew into his face. Into his eyes and he was blinded. He coughed violently. The men moved in his direction at the sound. He felt the vibration of their movement. He continued shouting for his father. The dust flew into his mouth and muffled the sound of his cries.

“Father!”

He swung his body round. Shouting in all directions. The men were close, he could feel them coming closer. He opened his mouth and screamed again, through the ash.

“Father!”

He tripped over the body. There it was the whole time, all this time — closer than he’d thought or realized. He knelt down and found an arm, a torso. He could not see so he went by touch. The cord of neck, the wings of his chest. The body jumped and rasped. Tom leaned closer. He could not remember the last time he had touched his father’s body. He gripped it through the ash.

He began brushing the ash away with one hand and then with both. He swept off handfuls of ash to reveal a patch of collar. A piece of skin. An open mouth. He brushed and brushed and uncovered his father piece by piece. He claimed a shoulder, a chin. Then a new sweep of ash covered him again.

Still he kept brushing at him, like a dog uncovering a bone. The ash was gathering in Tom’s throat. He coughed. The old man’s eyes were watering and they were turning the ash to mud on his skin. His mouth a smear of damp dust. Tom sat back. He gave up and watched as the ash covered his father. He watched it coating his face until it disappeared. In the distance, he heard the men moving in his direction.

“Here! Here!”

He tried to lift him up. He hoisted him up in his arms. The body bucked with a cough and slid out of his arms. He flopped back to the ground. Tom lifted him again, arms twisting as the old man writhed and slipped downward again. Tom had never realized how heavy his father was. His weight was supernatural. Like he was made from lead and malicious in unconsciousness.

Tom’s own body collapsed under its weight. He called out to the men again.

“Here! He is here!”

They arrived from all sides, like an ambush: men emerging from the swirl of ash. They surrounded the father and son. They were grainy silhouettes, dark shapes against the white cloud and dim light. They carried the electric torches pointing downward and they looked like billy clubs at their thighs. Their heads wrapped in shirts and scarves. Tom thought he saw Jose standing at the back of the group. He called out to him.

The call died in his throat. He saw Jose lift his hand as if to stay the men. They stood in a circle and did not move. Fear seized across Tom’s throat. They would die here — it was the most obvious idea in the world. The natives turning on them at last. They would be left to perish in the ash storm. They would suffocate on their own land. A stupid death looking more and more likely as the men gathered and did nothing.

The idea of their resentment never occurred to the old man. Even though there had been incidents — servants killing their own masters in the night, nannies slaughtering their wards — of which the old man was aware. His father’s power was too absolute for imagination. Tom, on the other hand, could imagine their resentment with ease. He was aware of how little the natives liked him. In an instant he was flooded with fear. It warped his sense of things and in particular time. It made a second or two seem much longer and it made him hysterical without cause.

He wondered if it would give the men pleasure to watch the two of them die. He thought it would. He couldn’t see how it wouldn’t. That was the last thought that crossed his mind. Then his throat closed and his consciousness gagged with the strain. He was seized, a cloth pulled across his face to protect his eyes and mouth and nose, all of which were burning. Through the cloth he could hear shouts and see the whirl of ash moving fast past him.

They carried Tom and his father back to the veranda. They dropped them on the floor, in separate piles of ash — it was everywhere, in giant drifts and piles, all across the room — and then set to work pulling the storm doors closed. They moved very quickly. Eyes shut, Tom’s fear dissolved and he was once more comforted by the presence of the men. He did not see the look that passed between them. He recovered his breath, lying still in the bed of ash.

The men pulled the storm doors into place and the house was plunged into darkness. The whisper of ash outside. In places the bobbing of the electric torches, the flicker of flame as the lamps and candles were lit. Tom wiped the ash from his face and sat up.

He saw Jose, kneeling beside the old man. He cradled the old man’s body in his arms and carefully cleared the ash from his face. The other men ran their hands down his limbs, checking for breaks and cuts. The women were not far behind, they came with cloths and bowls of water and they began wiping the man clean. They were preserving something without even knowing it, not understanding the consequences, as they worked over the old man and brought him back to consciousness.

Tom thought: the old man will live forever because they will it. Only because of that. He felt a throb of jealousy. To be cared for in this way. To be touched. In between the candlelight they moved. One of the women came to Tom and gently pushed him back to the ground. He lay in the bed of ash. She dipped a cloth in water and wrung it out slowly.

The sound of water dripping. She said to him the generator has been clogged by the ash. It is no longer working. But the old man is fine. The old man was safe. Tom nodded. She wiped the cloth across his face and said nothing further. She wiped around his mouth, his forehead. Down his arms and the flakes of horned skin. She cleared the grit from his eyes. He saw Jose, giving orders, organizing the men. He closed his eyes. He lay back. He waited, for now.

5

Two weeks later, his father leaves the farm, taking Jose and the girl with him.

Jose is loading a wagon full of trunks. The girl sits in the wagon bed, wrapped in a shawl. She is propped up on pillows and there is a carafe of tea by her side and an open tin of lobster. She stares straight ahead, eyes blank and cloudy. Her fingers work the fabric of her dress and she trembles very slightly. The weather has changed in the weeks since the volcano exploded.

Jose loads the wagon and his father watches. The old man is wearing a three-piece suit for traveling. A watch and chain and his wallet heavy in his pocket. He is bare headed. He looks and then goes to the girl. He pulls a blanket across her lap and tells her to eat the lobster. She nods and reaches for the tin. Fumbles with a fork and then eats it with her fingers.

His father smokes a cigarette. Jose throws rope across the heap of trunks and valises. He pulls the rope tight and the wagon rocks and creaks. They pile more trunks in. The girl’s things. She has been changed but there is still the matter of her trinkets and her objects, pilfered from his mother’s wardrobe. They drag behind her, she is barely aware of how they drag behind her. While his father is in the habit of traveling light. Never more than a single suitcase and now look at him.

Two weeks. Two weeks and he has decided to leave. He has split himself from the land, a cleaving formerly thought impossible, a separation still difficult to imagine. But now the wagon creaks with the load it carries, there is a wagon heavy with possessions, the old man is leaving like the other whites — and Tom is staying behind.

IN THE PAST two weeks Tom’s fear had grown as the valley recovered and the old man’s face grew quiet and watchful. The ash was cleared from the pastures and shoveled from the roofs of the houses. The natives hauled it away in wheelbarrows and made giant heaps on the edge of each village. Then the sky was clear and only the ash heaps stood like obscure markers to the storm.

But on the farm: a record of ongoing catastrophe. When the fish began to float in the river, Tom saw the inverse to everything: the fishing, the food on the table, the money. Everything that had drawn the girl to them in the first place. The dreamlike arms and legs of the river farm, which sat useless in the water, corralling fish that were going nowhere. As the bodies gathered they added pressure and weight until the legs creaked and cracked and then broke.

As soon as the ash stopped the old man sent the natives into the river to retrieve it. They listened to him give the order and stared into the water. They didn’t move. They stared at the mass of rotting flesh and turbid sludge. Then they looked at him as if to say: if that was what he ordered (it was). If that was what he wished (it was). They stripped down to the waist and stood on the banks of the river. They waited to see if he would change his mind. He didn’t and they tied cloths around their faces and dropped into the water.

They began moving at once. Standing waist deep in the river, they used their hands to push the bobbing fish away. They moved in the direction of the river farm and then fanned out to circle the apparatus. Their faces impassive behind the cloths. Slowly they surrounded the apparatus and then reached for the legs, which were slippery with muck and rot. They turned to pull it toward land.

The apparatus did not move. The fish were too deep in the water. The men were pushing their own legs through the layers of dead fish. They were squeezing through the wall of bodies. Moving in its crevices. They pulled again. The apparatus remained immobile. Their grip slipped on the legs and the machine sank down into the water.

They called to the men watching on the riverbank. They stripped down and plunged into the water. They shouted for rope, which they tied around the legs of the machine. They sent the lightest man to do it. He lay sprawled across the machine, moving from leg to leg, tying knots around each joint. Then he gave a shout and dropped back into the water. He shouted again and they threw the lengths of rope to the men still standing on land.

They pulled. Slowly the machine rose out of the water. With a grim expression, the men in the river dunked down below the machine and hoisted it above the river of fish. As they rose out of the water they were covered in grime to their faces. Decaying plant and flesh draped from their neck and arms. They shimmied through the dead fish, holding the apparatus above their heads, carrying and pulling it to shore. Then they dropped the machine onto dry soil and stood, reeking of rot and panting from their labor.

The river farm was in ruin. The men were too pleased with their labor to notice at first. They laughed as they wiped the river gunk from their bodies. Chunks of decomposing flesh. All the dying, all around them, became like comedy. They laughed and laughed from relief. They were almost giddy, they were content, as the rot fell from their bodies to the ground.

Into their laughter — his father’s cry, a terrible noise. He stood, staring at the machine. Slowly, the men turned and looked. It lay in a heap, groaning. Sputtering. Moaning in death throes. In actual terms the machine was silent but there was sound in the sight of the machine, sprawled out on the ground, legs collapsed, like a street thug had taken a club to each one of its joints.

Tom was also there. And he thought: it had been such a beautiful thing, the first time they had taken it out. They had carried it to the river and set it drifting. The legs had spread into the water like a living thing and it sat on the river aloft — the most astonishing thing they had ever seen. A miracle of technology and time. A piece of the future that had been shipped to their remote corner of the world. He had seen the farm’s beauty, even if he didn’t understand its role in the farm’s future, even if he also feared and hated its purpose.

Now the machine lay in ruin and it took the old man with it. They saw it happening, it took place right in front of them. They saw but it was still hard to believe. They looked at the machine. They looked at the man. They did not believe in his going. The sound, the sound of a man going — it was everywhere around them. But his face was stoic and his body straight. He looked stern and unforgiving yet. Then he turned and walked back into the house, leaving the men and the machine behind him.

BY THE WAGON, the old man puffs on the cigarette. He watches Jose continue preparations. Tom feels a churn of rage inside. From the outside, nothing is visible. But inside he is a jumble of half words and half deeds. He thinks: I have been running the farm in all but name. Leave and nothing here will change. You will see. The land will survive. Also the farm. The natives will stay here with me. And I will be fine, yes, I will be fine. He does not believe the words, which enter his head freighted in confusion.

The girl sits on the pillows and eats from the tin of lobster. Chunks of shellfish between her thumb and forefinger. She puts the tin down and wipes her fingers on the blanket. There it is: a real piece of baggage. Living and breathing as it is. Weighing the old man down as it is. Tom bristles just looking at her. She sits among the boxes and the bags and for the first time — through the cloud of rage and panic — Tom sees what his father is taking with him.

A multitude, an ocean of things. The girl is sitting on loot, on things taken — she rides high on the surf of things taken. The loaded wagon material proof of the old man’s departure. Tom cannot understand how it has come to this. Two weeks and a lifetime has been undone. He watches his father. The old man circles the wagon. He tests the ropes. The loading is almost done. He takes out his silver watch and checks the dial.

The old man is the same by most known measures. Remote, imperious, unknowable: the same as before. And yet the old man is entirely changed. Despite the disorder in his head, Tom understands something new about his father: that he is a man made visible by means of a backdrop. His father is a shape cut out against a landscape he has personally dominated and formed.

The shape is still the same. It is the backdrop that has gone, and with it everything that makes the man himself. Tom can hardly recognize his father. He cannot see him in the same way, especially now, now that he is leaving, now that he is already parted, has parted himself, from the land and property. It cannot only be Tom. Others must see him differently. A man in bad fortune. His dreams for the future looking foolish. A man without money, which is also ridiculous.

Tom does not know if his father is aware of how he looks. He does not think he cares. His father has been preoccupied. He has stayed to his study. Looking at papers, laying out maps, writing down figures. The old man making midnight telephone calls, the conversations muffled by the house’s thick walls so that Tom did not hear the matters being discussed. Although he eavesdropped carefully, diligently.

There was more: the departure of the three men, the day the ash stopped falling. Who left with promises of their return and the strong smell of brilliantine. That afternoon the girl crawled out from her room. She did not look like herself. She was pale and even thinner but the difference was in her eyes. Which had fallen back into her head. She was watching things from a distance, measurably greater than before.

There were other differences. The girl now stayed close to the old man. She was with him all the time. She sat inches away from him at dinner, fork clanging at his plate, fingers reaching for his elbow. The girl standing between the father and the son. Like she was the physical manifestation of the barrier Tom had often tried to deny, but that had always existed between them. As if she were now the guardian of that distance. Tom saw her sitting by the old man’s side. He saw her lift up her face to look at him.

They might have shared blood. The girl the old man’s daughter. The girl the old man’s son, as he might have been, the girl the old man himself. They would stay together. One and one being two. One and one and one on the other hand — it did not add up. Tom did not fit in. In the house there was sunlight and dust so thick it made patterns in the air. He passed the old man’s study, he saw the girl and the old man sitting side by side. Neither looked up.

Later, he came upon the girl alone. He stopped and she stopped, too. He looked down at her hand, it was hard for him to look her in the face. She was still wearing his mother’s engagement ring. He shook his head in confusion and looked up. Now at her face, which had been wiped blank. She knitted her brow as she looked at him.

“What has happened?”

He intended to sound firm. As if he had some purchase on the situation. He was aware of how close she stood. The fetid smell of her hair.

She shook her head. She had never liked Tom. And they had wanted her to marry him. They had believed this was the solution. Her eyes widened. Briefly. An instant later they receded and she recovered her distance.

Her eyes were once again blank. Not that Tom knew or understood. No details — the details sickened him. He knew that something had happened, that there had been an incident. In this backdrop of new catastrophe. He saw how the girl was and that was enough. He looked at her again.

“Please.”

She shook her head. She sighed: the sound like her lungs had broken.

“Do you know—”

She stopped. The girl meant nothing to him and even so. Tom swallowed and waited for her to speak. Her face was vague and she did not look at him when she spoke, her eyes wandered and wandered instead.

“The Rheas. The birds are big. The size of humans. They live on land. Too big to fly—”

She paused. Her brow crossed with confusion. She started again.

“A male Rhea has a dozen mates. He impregnates one bird and then moves on to the next. But he risks his life in defense of all his offspring.”

She paused again. He had no idea what she was talking about. She shook her head.

“No. I wanted to tell you something different. Something about the Rheas.”

She stopped and seemed to think about it. She picked loose a dry piece of skin from her lip.

“When the men fight to assert dominance it goes like this—”

She cleared her throat and closed her eyes.

“When the male Rheas fight to assert dominance it goes like this. They lock necks and spin around in circles. Because they are large birds — some as heavy as one hundred pounds — they gather tremendous momentum. They spin around and around and around. The one who gets dizzy first is the loser. They keep going until there is a loser. They don’t stop until then.”

She opened her eyes and smiled at him. Her face was cunning again, it was canny.

“Do you see?”

He did not see. He thought she might have lost her mind.

AFTER SHE TOLD the story about the Rheas, Tom began to think his father might marry the girl after all. The girl being the last remaining symbol of his power. The girl whom he would legitimate for this reason. It would happen the way a bank transfer happened. In material terms the ring would stay on her finger. Meanwhile the attachment it represented would transfer from one man to the other. It would be personally humiliating but Tom was used to being humiliated. He could have lived with it.

But this — he looks at the wagon. He watches his father check the ropes one last time. This abandonment, by all of them — it is worse than the nightmares that plague him at night. Jose leads three horses out from the stable. A pair to pull the wagon and his father’s best horse. The old man mounts the expensive animal, the horse likely worth more than the farm at this point. He circles the wagon and goes to the girl, who has finished the tin of lobster. He takes the empty tin from her and hands it to one of the servants.

They are going. It is happening! It cannot be stopped. Nothing Tom can do will be enough to make the old man stay. Jose climbs aboard the wagon and whips the horses to life. They strain and pull and the wagon creaks. They move an inch and then a foot. The horses have never been made to carry such weight. Jose whips the pair again and at last they bear the wagon away. His father rides alongside. He does not look at his son as he goes.

Tom watches as the cart and horse move down the track. Two days ago his father had said to him — two days, it has only been two days, since his father announced that he was leaving. He had come to the shed, where Tom was cleaning the tack. It was dark and there were soft drifts of ash still on the floor and on the shelves.

“Thomas.”

He had stopped at the sound of the old man’s voice.

“We’re going.”

Carefully, he put down the bridle and harness.

“We—”

“Carine and I.”

He turned to face the old man in the darkness. Both of them black from lack of light.

“Where?”

“To the city.”

“For how long?”

“I do not know.”

He nodded, his mouth was dry. He wondered why his father had chosen to speak to him here — in the shed, the smell of leather and oil and horse shit. Of all places.

“What will happen to the farm?”

“I leave that to you. It is yours, now.”

The words were meaningless. The ownership was meaningless, now. Tom turned back to the bridle. He gripped the metal and leather straps. He picked up the rag, rubbed the oil into the straps, he polished the metal and tried to think of a way to speak.

“Is it because of the girl?”

The old man didn’t answer. Tom continued to rub oil into the leather.

“It would be a shame — to let a woman come between us.”

His voice catching. The words difficult to say. The old man still did not answer. Tom put the bridle down. He turned to face his father.

“I don’t mind. I understand.”

The old man did not move.

“You can have her.”

He could not see the old man’s face. He stood in the silence with his feet in the ash. The old man let out a short laugh. Like the muffled sound of heavy blows. Tom continued, raising his voice.

“There is no reason for you to leave. You could both stay. I understand.”

The old man did not move. The silence bounded through the dark. Tom peered at him, hands trembling. He waited for the old man to speak.

“We are going.”

Abruptly, his father turned. He walked to the door and pulled it open. The blood rushing to Tom’s head as he watched. Standing in darkness, Tom watched the old man walk away. He tried to understand what had happened. What the old man had said. What he meant by what he said. How such a thing could be possible. He cleaned and oiled the bridles three times over. Then he trudged back to the house.

That was two days ago. Now Tom stands in front of the house and watches as the procession — a short procession, very short — moves away. The girl’s shawl flutters and then falls to her side. As the distance grows, he watches her small hand stroke it into place. He keeps watching, as the wagon pulls through the gate, down the track, becoming smaller and smaller. Then his father brings his own horse to a gallop, like he cannot wait to get away from the place. In a moment they are gone.

The servants stand stock-still. They stare after the wagon, down the track, like that will bring the old man back. Bring Jose back. They murmur to each other and wait. Celeste at the front of the group, peering hard at the horizon. They wait for the cart to return, for the miracle to happen. It is not going to happen. Tom wants to tell them this, he wants to tell Celeste, but they are not going to listen to him. There are still puffs of dust from the wagon visible on the road and he lets them cling to that.

Tom turns and goes back to the house. He is not aware that he is running but his feet are pounding the stone floor. The house is dark and cool. He turns and checks to see if anyone is following. Nobody is there, they are still standing at the front of the house, waiting for the old man to return. Tom wipes at the sweat on his forehead, he is suddenly perspiring, and continues down the dark hallway. He pushes open the door to the old man’s study.

He scans the room, then heads to the desk. He opens the drawers, looking for papers, bank notes, bonds. Keys to the safe, sacks of money and coin. None of which he finds. He examines the walls, looking for a safe. He looks underneath the desk, below the tables. He shoves aside a painting on the wall — nineteenth century, a young woman and a small dog. The safe is empty as a drum.

He sits down. He thinks he must have fever — that must be the reason for the room spinning like it is. There are sicknesses in these parts. There is illness in his blood. Look at his mother. Now his father has deserted the farm, taken the money and the valuables, and Tom does not know where he has gone. He only knows that his father will set up a new life. The old man will have his third act.

And here is the son with nothing. The woman gone and the son’s inheritance lost in a cloud of ash, carried away on a wagon cart. How will he make the farm run? How will he keep it safe? The joke is this: his father could save the farm but chooses not to. He built this place therefore it follows that he knows how to save it. But he chooses to go away instead. People will say it is about the unrest. They will say it is about the girl. They will say that the old man cannot bear the heat and has gone away instead.

It does not matter what people say. What matters is this: the old man has looked at the farm and decided it was not worth the trouble. It including Tom. The old man has made his choice and Tom has fallen by the wayside. When Tom has always believed, he has trusted in the bond between the land and the old man, he has allowed himself to think his place in that bond meant more than it did. He had thought the old man would take care of him.

Tom sits down in his father’s armchair. The house is quiet. He looks at the papers that are scattered on the floor — he had upended drawers in his search. He picks up the papers again. There may be something he missed. Bank details. Offshore accounts. Hidden and electric treasure. He is not avaricious but he is human and practical despite himself. He stands up and goes to the desk. He looks at the papers — he reads them for the first time. He sets them down again.

He does not really understand. Tom does not have a head for such things. He is not accustomed to the idea of the world outside the farm. Tom has no inflated sense of his personal capacities, he is not unusually arrogant, but he believes his world will hold fast. The idea that changes in the world outside the farm — the idea of the world outside in the first place — that together they can shift his personal landscape, that is one, two, three leaps too many.

Tom does not know about appeasement. He does not know about the deals that are made. Expropriation is not a word in his small — small and shrinking, shrinking with each moment — vocabulary. He does not know that people can send you notices and the notices are not just pieces of paper but pieces of paper that have real meaning in the world.

Real meaning as in: I show you this piece of paper and you have one month to go. Real meaning as in: I show you this piece of paper and the property you think of as yours is no longer the property you think of as yours, the property you think of as yours is something else entirely.

According to the papers most of the land no longer belongs to them. The papers (and the maps, there are many maps in amongst the papers) delineate the new acreage of the farm and it is dramatically reduced in size: the ten-mile spine has been lopped at both ends and only ten thousand acres remain. The negotiation has happened, the expropriation has begun. The land is being taken from the white settlers. The trees and hills have picked up and gone, they have packed their bags and departed down the track.

Like his father. They are gone in exactly the same way. Tom picks up a map indicating the new lay of the land and then drops it. It falls to the floor and crumples. Ninety thousand acres gone! He will need to ask his father what to do, only his father will know. But the old man is nowhere in sight. Instead there is just his signature, on the bottom of page after page after page.

His father is not moved by malice, Tom thinks, just by self-interest. His father being the most selfish man that ever breathed. For the first time Tom understands this. Only his mother was as selfish as the old man and that was why they did not love each other but were tied together in ways they half understood and fully resented. The two of them were the same in the end. They went in the same way. First the mother had gone by way of sea. Now the father has gone by way of land and the son is left alone.

Tom returns to the veranda. The servants have disappeared and the place is quiet. So here he is. The farm is his at last. He looks out to the horizon and he is terrified. The world outside, beyond its borders. He sees the three men and the documents they were examining. He sees his father reading the newspaper. The knotted grip of his hands. Tom has always been slow to understand. The men were not there because of what happened to the girl that night. The men only being messengers for something else. It had nothing to do with her. No man ever stayed because of what happened to a woman.

They stayed for other reasons. And now they are gone and the land is also gone. All that is left is the papers. The papers and with them the people who will come to claim the land. How will it happen? Who will come? Tom’s laughter pierces through the air. The world is shrinking to a piece of paper. A white sheet pinned to the line and the sound of it thwacking against the wind. The land will cave. The paper is going to tear. And him, still here.